A hodgepodge of comments, some political, some cultural, some off-the-wall.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

The Hot Death revisited

It has been very interesting to notice the beginnings of ackowledged dissent among scientists in the global warming/climate change debate, not that it has been much of a debate. Normally, anyone who questions the real effect of humans and their activities on the changing climate has been dismissed with scorn. Maybe the apparent existence of skeptical climatologists and other scientists will continue to make waves in the MSM and real debate can begin before the course of civilization is altered irrevocably.

My friend Ken Falkenstein has written an essay that I reprint here.

"In the first half of the 20th century, the eugenics movement was as in vogue among the intellectual elite as man-made global warming is today. Euguenics was the psuedoscience that advocated breeding undesirable traits out of the gene pool. Undesirable traits included below-average intelligence, physical and mental handicaps, and ultimately "inferior" races, including blacks and Jews (which was considered a race by eugenicists). Leading advocates of eugenics included George Bernard Shaw and Alexander Graham Bell. Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were also sympathetic to the eugenics movement. Funding was provided by many philanthropic organizations, most prominently the Carnegie Foundation. The movement succeeded in having laws enacted to sterilize the mentally disabled and to strictly prohibit acceptable people from marrying and/or having children with people with undesirable traits. Hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized in California and Virginia, and a lesser amount in several other states. Virginia also passed very strict laws specifying who could marry whom, and these laws were strictly enforced for more than 3 decades. Even the US Supreme Court, with a decision penned by the great Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, upheld forced sterilization laws with the rationale that society has a right to breed "idiots" (the word he actually used in his reported opinion) from the gene pool. (This case techincally remains good law today, although no respectable attorney would ever cite it as legal authority.)

"Although eugenics was based solely on theories and models and could never withstand the rigors of scientific method (i.e. attempting to disprove it), it was enthusiastically promoted as "science" by its advocates, who consisted of society's most respected intellectuals and spread to political leaders. Real scientists who spoke out against eugenics found themselves ruthlessly attacked, shunned, and cut off from both government and private grant money until they were ruined. Finally, almost no one was willing to speak out for fear of ruining their careers and reputations.

"The movement spread from the US and Britain to Germany, where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took the idea to its extreme and set about murdering undesirables, most prominently Jews, from every country that fell under its control. Only after the Holocaust did the eugeneics movement fade, but even then it took until the 1960s to end forced sterilization in the US and even longer to remove many of the marriage limitations from state codes.

"The man-made global warming movement is now on the same path. The entire movement is based solely on theories and models, none of which have been or are even capable of being proven (or, more importantly, disproven). In fact, many of the same people who are on the man-made global warming bandwagon today were equally alarmist in the 1970s about the then-in-vogue theory that we were entering a new ice age. Nevertheless, anyone who dares speak truth to this perverse power finds himself attacked by all quarters, shunned by the intellectsia, and cut off from both public and private funding. In a sick twist, leading advocates such as Al Gore have actually compared those of us who challenge the lack of scientific basis for the man-made global warming theory to Holocaust deniers. (The obvious difference being, of course, that the "question" of whether the Holocaust occurred is capable of being subjected to a test of disproving it, and there is enormous and overwhelming evidence proving conclusively that it occurred. There is no proof whatsoever that the current warming trend in some [but not all] parts of the world is man-made, and advocates must rely on models that are not capable of being subjected to scientific method.)

"The news media, academia, and governments in the US at every level that are controlled by Democrats are now working in tandem to stifle dissent and ostacize dissenters so that they can enact draconian anti-Capitalist measures in the name of fighting man-made global warming. The British government is now showing Gore's propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, in its public schools without providing a counterbalancing viewpoint, and some school districts in the US asre trying to do likewise. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has just created a new special committee on global warming and did so because the chairman of the committe that would normally have jurisdiction over this issue is one of the few Democrats in Congress who is not in lock-step with the man-made global warming movement.

"History proves that what is happening right now is dangerous. Good science is being stifled in the name of a psuedoscientific political movement so that that movement can force irresponsible, tyrannical, and dangerous public policies into law. It is vital that good and enlightened people stand up to this intellectual bullying and continue to insist that public policies be based on sound science and not the psuedoscientific theory that is in vogue with the intellectual eleite at the moment."